I'm tired of the lie that Midwesterners are straight-taahkin', haanest-dealin', friendly blond goyim. Midwesterners are mean!
anarqueso got me thinking about this with her post about community. Readers, I am rarely depressed. I mean, I get "depressed", like when it's gray outside and I'm bored and broke, and I have a hunger headache and I see a poster for
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But I really wanted to love the Midwest. I still kind of do want to love it. With the UPS lady, I was ready to triumph Michigan as a place where even terrible corporations could function locally in a human way (no UPS in NY has EVER acknowledged the possibility of telling me when they'd actually show up).
But I find conformism really cloying. I asked my students a question the first day (did they want to read this thing in class, or at home) and nobody answered. I asked again. Silence. I said ok, raise your hand if you want to read this here. Everybody looked around, nobody raised their hand. I feel like this creeping authoritarianism in our culture is just much more obvious here, and it freaks me out.
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Could it just be because the students are lazy asses who didn't read the assignment, and they were just being honest? I had this same experience in my east coast schooling... but then again, most people at BU had been out partying the night before, so they perhaps had a legit reason not to answer. But there is always one know it all in class who wants to show off- I'm surprised your class didn't have one!
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